Entries Tagged 'Lesson Plan' ↓

If you’re looking for some practical pointers on how to do knowledge management successfully in a large global enterprise, it would be hard to point to a better organization to learn from than McAfee.

In recent years, the company’s support organization has received virtually every service award that matters: They’re a three-time winner of ASP’s10-best support sites award, they won the SSPA Star Award for the best use of knowledge, and they twice won the LISA Award for being one of the ten best international Web support sites.

Beyond all the awards, what’s most impressive to me are the bottom line gains they can point to: they’ve been able to build effective automated help and online self-services that successfully resolve more than 65% of their customers’ support inquiries. This nets them savings of over $45 million a year.

Greg Sanders, McAfee’s Director of Global Online Services, gave a talk at an SSPA conference, outlining how they’ve been able to automate much of their customer services, much to the delight of both their customers and their executive staff. Fortunately, for those of us who weren’t able to attend in person, the talk is available in a nice recording. (While we’re extremely proud to point to McAfee as a customer, the presentation isn’t a product pitch, in fact the talk was delivered before they completed the InQuira implementation.) The talk gives a very nice overview of some core strategies that have made McAfee so successful.

To view, click here. (Note, if you’ve never registered on InQuira’s site, you’ll get to a brief form to access the presentation. For those who have registered in the past, you’ll just need to resubmit your email address.)

Following are a few nuggets I gained:

• Culture. Fundamentally, this was about changing the culture, which is never an easy thing to do. They were able to move from a climate in which knowledge was power, something to be put in silos and protected, to something that is shared, and developed collaboratively. This is fundamental to their success. As a result, they’ve been able to improve consistency, efficiency, and results.
• Content development. While some advocate making solution generation part of every agent’s job description, McAfee has created a model in which dedicated writers, who are also product experts, take on the bulk of new solution development. It is also important to note that they leverage analytics and direct interactions with customers to guide new content development.
• Cross-channel integration. McAfee has implemented an online diagnostic tool, the “McAfee Virtual Technician”, which can automatically and remotely diagnose a user’s system to identify a host of common issues. What’s most striking to me, beyond this tool solving 45% of customer’s issues, is that if the tool doesn’t succeed, and customers ultimately go to chat with an agent directly, all the diagnostic data generated from the tool is fed immediately into the chat session, so the customer doesn’t have to start from scratch. Rather, the platform, OS, reported issues, etc. are all there for the agent to refer to.

Those are just a few of the key points, but there’s a lot more Greg covers. I’d encourage you to check out the presentation, titled “The Evolution of the Automated Contact Center”, for yourself. To view the presentation, click here.

Collaboration initiatives offer real promise of furthering the evolution of customer service. Today, leading companies are leveraging collaboration to transform their service desks into knowledge hubs, central points in which knowledge is gathered, shared, and made actionable—so users and agents can solve issues and proactively keep problems from arising at all.

Based on our experience, here are some words of guidance as organizations consider harnessing collaboration to bring this reality to fruition:

• Embrace. Let go of your misgivings: an open discussion can help you create a learning infrastructure. Spot issues early and minimize their impact. Empower your users and make them feel included, which in turn makes them more loyal.
• Launch. As you deploy a new application or technology, consider deploying a dedicated discussion forum. Seed it with questions, have experts answer them and build up momentum.
• Participate. To keep up with change, encourage your staff to join external online communities dedicated to associated technologies, applications, and industries. Get feeds from these communities using RSS and notifications and feed these into your knowledge portal. You can benefit from others’ knowledge and they in turn can benefit from your experiences.
• Incent. Put incentives in place to encourage usage by users and your staff. Build a network of experts with a reputation model based on the usefulness and frequency of knowledge contributed.
• Harvest. Don’t let the knowledge being generated disappear into the ether. Put a capture process in place to mine the most useful posts, and structure them into solution briefs, FAQs, tips, and the like. Route these to the experts to review and approve them where needed. Secure them, give them context, and then deliver them back to the user community, via your knowledge portal.
• Learn. Continually measure and improve the entire process. Assess how knowledge is being captured and routed. Track the overall usefulness and timeliness of knowledge.
   

We see it nearly every day.  People confuse Content Management (CM) with Knowledge Management (KM). Both deal with creating, managing and publishing content - so it’s easy for the lines to blur. Dig a little deeper, though, and you will discover that content and knowledge are quite different and require distinct workflow processes and solutions to manage effectively.

Content management is generally a one-way process where content is pushed to an audience from some centralized group of authors or SMEs, who are often removed from the people who actually consume the content (i.e. employees, partners, customers), and disconnected from the business situations that prompt the demand for that content in the first place. There is very little collaboration and limited opportunities for others to share information.

Knowledge management extends content management by enabling collaboration and the harvesting of knowledge content, thoughts, ideas, solutions, tips and tricks from multiple sources - both internal and external to the organization, often at the point of demand (i.e. when an agent is resolving an open case; or from a discussion in a support forum).  With knowledge management the people who use the content and information in the system have the opportunity to provide feedback on what they need and make contributions to the system that others can leverage when find themselves in similar business situations. This approach distributes the content creation and maintanence burden, and vastly improves the quality and value of the system for those who are using it.  

Want to learn more?

In case you missed the first one, this is the second installment of a podcast series to answer the Q&A from the Knowledge Management Implementation Strategies: An InQuira Point of View webcast we ran with Brent Hayward, InQuira VP of Professional Services.

Listen to hear Brent’s answers to these questions (and more):

• On the future of KM. What does Web 3.0, defined as the semantic Web, mean to knowledge management down the road?
• On content strategy. How do you balance the need to harvest content from front-line sources with the need to control and validate that content and you knowledge management system?
• On collaboration. What is your definition of collaboration and how does InQuira software support it?

 

 Ask Inquira Podcast, vol 2 [20:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (197)

Not too long ago, we ran a webcast with InQuira Vice President of Professional Services Brent Hayward on Knowledge Management Implementation Strategies that generated so many questions during the hour we had for the live event that Brent could not possibly answer them all.

So we got Brent back on the horn, and captured his answers to those questions in podcast format. In this installment, the first of two, Brent answers these questions, and more:

• On how customer experience relates to knowledge management. What if our user experience is not defined? Would it be designed as part of the KM implementation? Should there be a customer advocate in the organization who owns the customer self-service experience?
• On findability. How much content does a company need to create for the search user experience to be meaningful?
• On which companies get it right. What is your opinion of which companies are best in class in terms of how they implemented a knowledge management solution?

 

 Ask InQuira Podcast, vol 1 [17:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5)